A couple of days back, I sat down for lunch with some colleagues in the 'shaft' of our circular building. We sat on plastic chairs in the semi darkness imposed on us by the famous architects.

The first thing that made me realise something was going wrong was the sharb, jabbing sensation in my throat, any time I decided to do something like breathe. A fish bone had found it's way past the protective wall that is my tongue. At first it didn't seem so bad; thanks to the lifetime of warnings from my father, I'd always imagined that letting a fishbone down your throat somehow resulted in both instant death and a slow painful death. I thought, "this isn't so bad". A few seconds later, I started to feel on the wrong side of right, and excused myself.

I thought maybe swallowing some water to force it down might be a good idea, an act I now realise was foolish. In fact, it did nothing, so I retreated to the toilets, and locked myself in the first cubicle I came to.

Right. Fingers-down-throat time. Either the nerves in your throat are not good at locating things, or my brain was not used to the task of locating things in my throat, because when I thought about it, I had the definite feeling that there were many sharp pains in my throat, though I was sure there was just a single bone.

I put one finger down the side of my throat, I don't know if I'd have been able to do it had it been in the middle. Fairly unpleasant, but I managed to locate the bone with my first reckless entrance. The bone was well lodged, because with one finger I was not able to move it. I tried this about twenty times: finger down throat then various degrees of gagging. I tried relaxing my throat, and tried breathing while exploring at the same time. It wasn't easy.

After five minutes, I somehow knew that I would now be able to get both fingers down, probably without showering the inside of the cubicle in mackerel. I put both, now well lubricated, fingers down, and grasped the bone. With more than a little force, I pulled the bone out to freedom. It was a thin thing, but half covered in blood, quite impressive.

I discarded it in the toilet, but didn't flush just for the tiny bone. Quite 'eco', I thought. Not as eco as my girlfriend though. As when I mentioned my lunchtime antics to her in an email later, she said that I should have saved the bone to put in the compost.

Thanks for listening.